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Re: Cost-effectivenesss of highly-accurate clocks for NTP


From: Bruce Simpson <bms () fastmail net>
Date: Sun, 15 May 2016 08:21:05 +0100

On 13/05/16 20:39, Eric S. Raymond wrote:
In 2012, nearly three years before being recruited for NTPsec, I
solved this problem as part of my work on GPSD.  The key to this
solution is an obscure feature of USB, and a one-wire
patch to the bog-standard design for generic USB that exploits
it.  Technical details on request, but what it comes down to is
that with this one weird trick(!) you can mass-produce primary time
sources with a jitter bounded by the USB polling interval for
about $20 a pop.

The USB 1 polling interval is 1ms.

What about USB 3.1 (assuming the device is not intended to be backwards compatible with the polling model) ? I should point out Intel intend to retire EHCI/UHCI and implement only xHCI.


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